Zumba Instructors-teaching participants with special needs

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ucbearcat06
ucbearcat06 Posts: 15 Member
in Fitness and Exercise
I am looking into becoming a Zumba Instructor and want to teach it to kids with special needs. What trainings would I need in order to be able to do this? Thanks to whoever responds!

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  • tiny_clanger
    tiny_clanger Posts: 301 Member
    edited January 2017
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    Do you have any current experience working with children with special educational needs/disabilities? What are you thinking off, social/communication disorders, SpLD, learning difficulty and/or physical disability? Each will require a particular set of skills and training. Knowing appropriate inclusive adaptations for children with disabilities is quite a different skills from making adaptations for children with autism, which is different for adaptations for children with PMLD.
  • girlwithcurls2
    girlwithcurls2 Posts: 2,276 Member
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    That's an awesome idea. I would try to find out if there are workshops in your area (maybe through the school district?) that you could access. There are always online classes too, although they will be more classroom specific than Zumba. You're probably going to need to know about different learning styles that come with different diagnoses. For one thing, you could have a room with 7 kids with autism and find out that you need 7 different strategies. If you have kids with physical limitations, I'd think you would need very specific knowledge/training about what their bodies can and should do.

    I'm a special education teacher who has often considered transferring my skills to something similar, like cutting hair for people with special needs.

    Oh, and YOU are going to need flexibility (mental) and patience :) Best of luck!!!
  • ucbearcat06
    ucbearcat06 Posts: 15 Member
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    I'm actually a special education teachers aide
  • ucbearcat06
    ucbearcat06 Posts: 15 Member
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    I just thought of the idea because of how much my autistic brother enjoys the Zumba class I go to every week. I just wasn't sure if I could do that with the Zumba basic 1 training.
  • sarko15
    sarko15 Posts: 330 Member
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    I don't know much about Zumba instructor training, but I can't imagine that much Zumba training is created with people with special needs in mind at all. At that point, you'll have to educate yourself.

    My suggestion is to spend some time volunteering with Special Olympics and learn about how people with special needs interact with each other, and what kinds of modifications are needed. I've coached SO for about four years (and am a "fitness buddy" for people with disabilities at my local Y) and you learn a lot more than you'd think. Keep in mind that some of your students will need significant modifications, and you'll want to be able to make it so people with limited mobility can participate too. And as you know from your brother, autism is a spectrum and each person on the spectrum can have different triggers, and they can often trigger each other so definitely know how to de-escalate. I've had athletes just egg each other on and then everyone gets triggered and it's not pretty. If you're teaching a class with multiple students with special needs, keep in mind you'll need multiple instructors to meet care ratios.

    Good luck!
  • lorrpb
    lorrpb Posts: 11,464 Member
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    My Y has swim sessions for kids with special needs & volunteers work with them. Something like that will give you training and experience that you could eventfully transfer to Zumba.

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